“Oh, Frank! Frank! is not His precious blood enough to cleanse all sin, without the sacrifice of our own?”
“We may need no more than His blood, mother, and yet He may need ours,” said Frank.
. . . . . . .
How that conversation ended I know not, nor whether Spenser fulfilled his purpose of introducing the two brothers and their mother into his “Faerie Queene.” If so, the manuscripts must have been lost among those which perished (along with Spenser’s baby) in the sack of Kilcolman by the Irish in 1598. But we need hardly regret the loss of them; for the temper of the Leighs and their mother is the same which inspires every canto of that noblest of poems; and which inspired, too, hundreds in those noble days, when the chivalry of the Middle Ages was wedded to the free thought and enterprise of the new.
. . . . . . .
So mother and sons returned to Bideford, and set to work. Frank mortgaged a farm; Will Cary did the same (having some land of his own from his mother). Old Salterne grumbled at any man save himself spending a penny on the voyage, and forced on the adventurers a good ship of two hundred tons burden, and five hundred pounds toward fitting her out; Mrs. Leigh worked day and night at clothes and comforts of every kind; Amyas had nothing to give but his time and his brains: but, as Salterne said, the rest would have been of little use without them; and day after day he and the old merchant were on board the ship, superintending with their own eyes the fitting of every rope and nail. Cary went about beating up recruits; and made, with his jests and his frankness, the best of crimps: while John Brimblecombe, beside himself with joy, toddled about after him from tavern to tavern, and quay to quay, exalted for the time being (as Cary told him) into a second Peter the Hermit; and so fiercely did he preach a crusade against the Spaniards, through Bideford and Appledore, Clovelly and Ilfracombe, that Amyas might have had a hundred and fifty loose fellows in the first fortnight. But he knew better: still smarting from the effects of a similar haste in the Newfoundland adventure, he had determined to take none but picked men; and by dint of labor he obtained them.
Only one scapegrace did he take into his crew, named Parracombe; and by that scapegrace hangs a tale. He was an old schoolfellow of his at Bideford, and son of a merchant in that town—one of those unlucky members who are “nobody’s enemy but their own”—a handsome, idle, clever fellow, who used his scholarship, of which he had picked up some smattering, chiefly to justify his own escapades, and to string songs together. Having drunk all that he was worth at home, he had in a penitent fit forsworn liquor, and tormented Amyas into taking him to sea, where he afterwards made as good a sailor as any one else, but sorely scandalized John Brimblecombe by all manner of heretical arguments, half Anacreontic, half smacking of the rather loose doctrines of that “Family of Love” which tormented the orthodoxy and morality of more than one Bishop of Exeter. Poor Will Parracombe! he was born a few centuries too early. Had he but lived now, he might have published a volume or two of poetry, and then settled down on the staff of a newspaper. Had he even lived thirty years later than he did, he might have written frantic tragedies or filthy comedies for the edification of James’s profligate metropolis, and roistered it in taverns with Marlowe, to die as Marlowe did, by a footman’s sword in a drunken brawl. But in those stern days such weak and hysterical spirits had no fair vent for their “humors,” save in being reconciled to the Church of Rome, and plotting with Jesuits to assassinate the queen, as Parry and Somerville, and many other madmen, did.
So, at least, some Jesuit or other seems to have thought, shortly after Amyas had agreed to give the spendthrift a berth on board. For one day Amyas, going down to Appledore about his business, was called into the little Mariners’ Rest inn, to extract therefrom poor Will Parracombe, who (in spite of his vow) was drunk and outrageous, and had vowed the death of the landlady and all her kin. So Amyas fetched him out by the collar, and walked him home thereby to Bideford; during which walk Will told him a long and confused story; how an Egyptian rogue had met him that morning on the sands by Boathythe, offered to tell his fortune, and prophesied to him great wealth and honor, but not from the Queen of